Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins (42 page)

When I was young I made a trip to Scotland, my grandparents' country,
Santiago Ferguson told his daughter, Catarina.
For me, that visit was both an inspiration and a reproach. In Glasgow, I encountered the past.

—Is that where you want to die?

—No.

—Then do you know where you want to die?

—Yes, in Wells Cathedral, he told her, he told us, far from anything that reminds me of all the things I don't wish to remember, in the place that least resembles what we have created here. In a church without Virgins.

After his burial she told us a story: the day he visited the Mackintosh house in Glasgow, Santiago Ferguson left his companions and lost himself in the labyrinth of those three buildings that fit one inside the other, like stacked Chinese boxes: a modern municipal building made of concrete, a prison posing as an art museum, and, at the heart of the architecture, the reconstruction (
sorrowful, secret, shameful,
Catarina) of the home of the Mackintosh family.

But as he became more and more lost in astonishment (labyrinth:
maze, amazement,
repeated Ferguson, possessed by that astonishment), two things happened simultaneously.

First of all, he felt the various styles of architecture, infinite and wonderful, shifting before him: Palladian theaters, prisons designed by Piranesi, Jeffersonian lookouts above the clouds of Virginia, Art Nouveau palaces in the Chihuahua desert, all telling him (as he, always teaching, tells her, tells Catarina) that the word “labyrinth” also denotes a poem that can be read backwards and forwards and makes sense either way.

At the same time, he felt that he was losing control of his movements.

The first sensation filled him with the special ecstasy associated with one of his most singular notions, that of an ideal communication between all human constructions. In the bold, the adventurous mind of Santiago Ferguson (our teacher, our father, her husband, your lover), architecture was the simple and complex approximation to an imagined and unattainable model. Through these ideas, Ferguson flirted with the simultaneously tempting and horrifying notion of a perfect symmetry that would be as much the origin as the fate of the universe.

Then we remembered that in class, as we tried to comprehend the mysterious web our teacher had woven around our lives without our realizing it, Santiago Ferguson vigorously rejected the concept of unity. He called it the “ultimate Romantic nostalgia.” But he considered equally detestable the notion of fragmentation, which he said was the devil's own work.

—The blithe Romantic identification of subject and object not only repulses me (it was as though we were still in his class, hanging on his every word); it terrifies me.

He made a sweeping gesture in the air. His blackboard remained empty. —It is a totalitarian idea, impossible physically, but enslaving mentally and politically, because it sanctions the excesses of those who would first impose it and then maintain it as the supreme, unassailable virtue.

Then he startled us, pounding his hands together twice, saying first—to see if we'd been dozing—that unity—now listen!—is no virtue, and, second, he scraped his chalk across the board to make our nerves stand on end, so we would be sure to hear:

—I fear happiness at any price. I fear imposed unity, but I have no desire for fragmentation either. Therefore, I am an architect.
Ab ovum.

He turned to scrutinize us, with something approaching tenderness.

—Simply, a building allows me to regain the difference between things, aiming for symmetry as the concept that contains identical measures of identity and difference.

These arguments, communicated by the professor with his usual fervor, were the essence of his thought, the ideology behind his always imperfect and incomplete work. He explained them, we said, with words and gestures that were warm and fluid—but more than once we surprised him peeing in the faculty bathroom, merrily spraying the white porcelain and repeating “I want symmetry, I want symmetry!” And still his elegance and energy seemed undiminished.

But in the Mackintosh house, at the same time that his faith in the significance of his profession was renewed, he also felt, in that labyrinth, that he was losing his motor control. He told Catarina it wasn't that he felt paralyzed or that his limbs felt heavy. On the contrary, his movements were as quick and precise and fluid as ever. But they were not his.

Then Santiago stopped—Catarina continued the story—and he realized that there was someone mimicking every one of his gestures. Terrified, he wanted to seize him, but he couldn't because the being that was imitating him was invisible; and yet Santiago could distinguish him perfectly well: he was a man with a thick mustache, wearing mourning clothes, a black silk tie, and a serious expression. I couldn't see him, said Ferguson (to Catarina), because, since he mimicked me so exactly, that strange alien being
was
me—he was within me so he was me, transported, in a sort of vision, outside of myself, so that I couldn't see him.

He felt that being within him and at the same time beside him, simultaneously preceding him and following him, so that it was impossible to determine whether that perfect similitude of expression and motion was an imitation of Santiago Ferguson by that repulsive, mournful being (he began to smell decay around him—putrid water, damp skin, old flowers) or if he, Santiago Ferguson, were imitating his invisible companion.

He told Catarina, “I wasn't master of my movements. When I stopped abruptly in a corner of the Mackintosh house—a house that had three times been walled, displaced, disguised—and a shaft of icy light suddenly blinded me, I couldn't tell, daughter, if I was the one who had stopped or if that being who imitated me so perfectly had stopped me. Then a totally alien voice came from my lips, saying,
Take care of us. From this time on, dedicate yourself entirely to us.

“I don't understand why, by what right, or on what whim, he dared impose that responsibility on me. I was blinded by the light but as my eyes adjusted to it, I could begin to make out a partly open door in one corner. Then the figure who had accompanied me pulled himself away from me and entered the space that could be glimpsed through the open door.

“Drawn in outline on the infinite whiteness within, two figures held out their hands to me, their arms open. The man who was and wasn't me went to join them, and then I saw that, like those two figures, one obviously feminine, the other a child, the figure of the man who had emerged from me melted into the whiteness of a white-tiled bath with porcelain frogs inset in a white bathtub and floral patterns that were barely visible through the thick steam of that architectonic belly.

“The man joined the other two figures, and then I saw how the woman and the child, she dressed in black, with her dark hair piled high, the blond child dressed in an old-fashioned suit with candy stripes, were wrapping themselves in fabric, in towels or sheets, I'm not sure, but only white material, wet, suffocating, and the man who had asked me to take care of the three of them joined his family, and like her, he began to change into a damp sheet, one of the sheets that stuck to those bodies I imagined foul, faded, savagely shrouded …

“They held out their hands to me, their open arms.

“From the child's little hands fell sweets wrapped in rich, heavy paper.

“The arms beckoned me, the sweets fell to the floor, and I felt myself surrounded by an intense, perfumed, unwanted love and I was about to succumb to it because no one had ever demanded and offered love with as much intensity as they did, that unlikely family, seductive, repugnant, white as purity itself but repulsive as the second skin, wet and sticky, of the shroud that covered them.

“I instinctively resisted the seduction, I decided they were the Mackintoshes, and that they were dead; you are a family of dead people, I told them, and with that a vista opened up behind them, behind their white, sticky redoubt, and there were all the houses of Glasgow, communicating with other structures that had been unknown before, almost unimagined, houses that had never been seen, perhaps had never been built, where other women wearing sumptuous capes of pale silk of the softest lemon and the filmiest olive walk through arcades and patios, carrying objects that I cannot recognize. Those women stood so erect, so sad, on a distant, precise, and horizontal world, that the effect—they were so far away yet I saw them so clearly—was to make me dizzy and nauseated.

“In the center of that distant horizon were two more figures, a woman clasping to her breast a child with an injured finger. The first group was hiding the other, but they were related, distant in space but near in time, symmetrical.

“I was afraid that they, too, would call to me and beg me:
Take care of us. Dedicate yourself totally to us from this time on
 …

“Other houses, different spaces, but is it always the same trinity, the same responsibility? Everything telescopes back to the immediate, concealing the distance or the future, whatever it was (or perhaps it belonged only to the
other
and I was afraid it was
mine,
neither
time
nor
space,
at last, comprehensible, but only
irrational possessions
), and the figures before me returned to the foreground, I heard the tantalizing crackle of the cherry, gold, and blue wrapping paper that held the sweets, and I saw the swaddled heads of the figures smiling at me.

“Beneath the damp cloth, the blood ran from their gums, painting their smiles.

“I looked at those figures—now there were three of them—and I decided I preferred my vision of them, no matter how horrible, funereal and white, to my second vision of the incomplete figures behind them. The man was absent from that second scene. There was only the mother and child, beckoning to me. I had no wish to be that absent man.

“No sooner had I thought that than I saw them, the three figures in the closer group, huddled in the brilliant white light of the bath, their damp clothing removed, appearing naked, rapidly growing younger before me; I quickly closed my eyes, already driven out of my mind by the chaos of my sensations, convinced that their youth and their nakedness would overcome me unless I closed my eyes to negate both their youth and their seductiveness; if I didn't look at them, they would grow old as quickly as they had regained their youth…”

He never explained to me—Catarina resumed the story—what he meant by “regaining their youth” insofar as the child in the candy-striped suit was concerned. Returning to the womb? Disappearing altogether? But Santiago did tell me that when the guards in that little Glasgow museum found him prostrate in a corner and asked him what had happened and what they could do for him, he couldn't very well question them to find out if there was a family forever walled in, there in the corner where they had found him, by the closed-off door of a bathroom, so white and steamy, blinding and damp …

He just stared at the candy wrappers scattered over the floor.

16

—Catarina, I don't know what I said in class today or why I said it. I don't know if other beings have taken possession of me, daughter, talking through me, making me say and do things against my will.

—I am not your daughter, Santiago.

—They make me feel that my most private acts are public ones.

—You seem so tired. Lie down here.

—Abandon, for example; a careless cruelty.

—Can I make you tea?

—Have they been following me, constantly tempting me, imitating my movements as a kind of seduction so that I would imitate theirs? I will never know, daughter.

—I am not your daughter, Santiago.

—Do they inhabit the real houses that you and I do, Catarina, or do they live only in imagined houses, invisible replicas of ours?

—You ask so many painful questions, Santiago. Look, you will feel better if I sit down next to you. What did you say in class today?

—I addressed the boys.

—And not the girls? You have plenty of girl students—and some of them are quite attractive.

—No, I was talking to the two of them, you know, to the twins, the Vélez brothers.

—And what did you say?

—I gave a class on architecture and myth, but I don't know why I said what I said …

—Well, Santiago, in that case, the best thing would be for you to stay here by the fire with me and we'll look at some books, as we always …

—That it is myths that haunt us, not ghosts, which are only specters produced by an unexpected intersection of myths. A Celtic myth, for example, might intersect with an Aztec one. But what interests me the most is the syncretic capacity of Christian myth to embrace them all and make them all rationally accessible at once, and at the same time irrationally sacred. That was my class. But I don't know why I said all that.

—You have just explained it to me, Santiago. You were trying to reach those two, Carlos María and José María.

—Ah, yes. We think our actions are ours alone; an act of wantonness, for example: it seems entirely ours, but soon, Catarina, something else happens that completes, negates, and mocks the action we thought was ours, making it part of a much larger scheme that we will never comprehend. So maybe what we call myths are, finally, just situations that correspond despite their distance in time and place.

—Have something to drink. Look at the books. These are the prints you like the best. Piranesi, see, Palladio …

—That is the secret of the houses we build and live in. Tell the boys that. Tell the brothers, Catarina.

—They are my brothers, Santiago.

—Take care of us. Dedicate yourself totally to us from this time on. Have mercy. Don't abandon us. Have pity.

—What can I do for you?

—Bury me far from here, in a sacred place, but a place where there are no Virgins on the altars. The creatures who are pursuing me will leave me in peace if I deceive them, by leaving the places I've lived in and the people I've known. I'll make them think I've joined them permanently, joined their watery voice, their damp skin, their wilted flowers, after I returned from Scotland, my grandparents' home …